The Art of the Meryl Streep Acceptance Speech

UPDATE: Well, what did I tell you? After struggling to maintain consciousness for the first seventeen hours of the awards, America woke up to a delectable Meryl Streep speech for the ages. Read more.

With all the uncertainties hanging over Sunday’s Oscars—Will the Muppets get to sing their nominated song? Will “God Is the Bigger Elvis” take home Best Documentary Short?—I come to you with this unwavering conviction: Meryl Streep should win Best Actress for her role in “The Iron Lady.”

I hear what you’re saying: “But the movie wasn’t that good.” So what? We’re talking Meryl Streep putting a lovable spin on a complicated historical figure, complete with latex makeup and a British accent. She should have won an Oscar for the teaser trailer alone. (“The pearls are absolutely non-negotiable.”)

You’re also saying: “But Meryl Streep has won enough Oscars. Shouldn’t Rooney Mara get a chance to shine? What about Glenn Close?” (Or, more accurately, Glenn Close But No Cigar. You know what would have happened had Meryl Streep played an Irish transvestite from olden times? Boom: Oscar.)

What you may not realize is that Streep has not won an Academy Award since 1982, for “Sophie’s Choice,” and before that she had won only for “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Yes, she’s been nominated a record-breaking seventeen times, but that means she’s lost fourteen times, which puts her firmly in Susan Lucci territory.

But the real reason I’m in the tank for Streep is simple: I want to see her acceptance speech. The Meryl Streep acceptance speech is an art unto itself: elegant, loopy, cunningly self-aware, and impeccably delivered—in short, everything you expect from a Meryl Streep performance, condensed to three minutes. Where else can you see fake humility, fake gratitude, and fake spontaneity delivered with such aplomb? Take her 2004 Emmy win, for “Angels in America”:

From her trademark breathy sigh (translation: “Gee, they just keep giving me these things”) and her droll opening line—”There are some days when I myself think I’m overrated … but not today”—this speech is a gem: funny, faux-scatterbrained, and self-consciously grand. When the orchestra tries to play her off, not only does she sing along to the music, she uses it as inspirational underscoring as she thanks Tony Kushner.

Or take another hall-of-famer, her 2009 SAG Award, for “Doubt” (excuse the subtitles):

Note the over-insistence that she actually cares about the award (“I really do appreciate this”), her coy self-effacement (“There is no such thing as the greatest living actress”), and the way she frames her own victory as a feminist triumph (“Everybody wins when we get parts like this”).

She touches on this theme as well in her 2007 Golden Globe speech, for “The Devil Wears Prada,” which begins with an indecipherable anecdote about snakes and ends with a plea for moviegoers to campaign their local theatre managers to show them “Notes on a Scandal” (Occupy Loews?):

Finally, I leave you with an instant classic from just two weeks ago, when Streep took home the BAFTA for “The Iron Lady.” Her entrance alone is as layered as a five-act play: first she kisses Viola Davis, then she decides to hand her purse off to the girl from “The Descendants,” then she loses a shoe, which is retrieved, in Cinderella fashion, by His Majesty Colin Firth. By the time she reaches the microphone, the job of arch self-deprecation has practically done itself:

So, this Sunday, consider this: in 1982, Streep had not yet mastered the art of playing Meryl Streep, Greatest Living Actress (for there is indeed such a thing). In the past decade, she’s learned to give the Emmys, the Golden Globes, the SAGs, and the People’s Choice Awards (for “Mamma Mia!,” naturally) the boost of swanning irony they so desperately call for. Imagine what she could do with the biggest award show of all. And, as tempting as it is to root for the underdog, remember: Meryl Streep is the underdog. The Greatest Living Underdog.